These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?
Regarding such formal reasoning we have already seen marked improvement in the last year or two alone. The question is how this weighs on your prediction re their capabilities in the next two, five, ten, etc years.
The present notions of harnesses, structured output or looping in the LLM to some external state or sandbox be it debugger output or embedding into a runtime already show early promising results along these lines. I see no reason to believe these gains will not continue over the next five years.
If you have some theories in the converse in that regard I am all ears.
If you think the potential of LLMs is overblown feel free to short the market. I don't pretend to know the future. But if I may, I don't think you are framing the debate in the correct terms. Evidence is an important facet of human affairs. So is risk. Best of luck with your predictions.
I agree with you both - undoubtedly there are still massive gains to be made with the frontier models we have today with tooling and iteration, yet I do not believe there's sufficient evidence to claim we are rolling towards AG/SI on an exponential curve, without some additional breakthroughs given the jagged edges and data used to train models being fundamentally linear
You just need AI to be just good enough to win the tradeoff over a human employee. Just take your average office. Then ask yourself if the bar is really that high. AGI strikes me as an extremely nebulous concept. Better to just list everyone at your office and bucket them with a guess of how soon you think AI will replace them. Or weaken their market power. This is what every corporate boss in America is already doing. I'm merely suggesting rather than hope a graph curves in our individual favor we try to act more collectively as a species. Of course, I don't hold my breath.
I also don't find myself compelled by the notion that the danger to humanity is "AGI". The true danger is as it always has been - each other.
How many years away do you think we are from a “concierge” AI that can do the menial tasks handled by most personal assistants / program managers? Booking flights and hotels and coordinating employee availability?
“Unlimited progress” is not a statement on the rate of progress, it’s a statement on the limits of progress. It’s a much weaker claim than you’re framing it as. Your claim very much is that we have not yet reached the limits of LLMs potential. My claim, conversely, is that we’re already reaching diminishing returns, which are being masked by a massive influx of compute and energy. My short: LLMs are not the path to AGI.
Most likely because you haven't constrained their behavior in your prompt. You're making the assumption that they "understand" that using best practices is what you want. You have to tell them that, and tell them which practices they should use.
If incorrect LLM output is a prompt issue then demand for experienced developers will remain, and demand may actually increase as time passes.
If LLMs get good enough, one might be tempted to ask so what if most humans can't understand the output? Human civilization has by and large been a constant exercise in us collectively accomplishing more and more while individually comprehending less and less.
Our ancestors likely understood more about hunting live game or murdering each other than we do. Most of us do not consider that a great loss. Most of us living in the modern world depend on things we don't fully comprehend. I'm just not sure how this would lead to being reassured re the human as SWE.
The article you shared has little to do with this. Questions of how to divide up gains technology creates are a separate question from that of the technology itself. Tbh I found what you shared so boring I could barely finish it. I already in this thread made an exhortation to support politicans who commit to erasing inequality. The idea that LLMs can only exist with inequality is nonsensical. The only thing grim about what you shared is the lack of political imagination. It's boring.
Software specialization might look very different in 10 years but I doubt that technically specialized humans will be completely removed from their professions. We might not be carrying bows and arrows anymore but we will be carrying the equivalent of a rope and a Stetson.
I appreciate your points. I agree with you that not all "technically specialized humans will be completely removed" but let's not pretend the comparison is going from a caveman with a spear to a cowboy with a lasso. If you concede it is likely to be very different at some point calling it SWE is no longer useful.
I think SWEs would be better off realizing they have enjoyed a relatively extreme level of privilege, and rather than trying to hold onto it, use what time they still have to advocate for a more egalitarian society, even if that means giving up some of their gains. Otherwise speaking of farming, the mass layoffs to come when software has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades will really be a chickens coming home to roost moment.
Considering that only 1% of the US workforce was a software engineer I expect similar workforce optimization to occur in software engineering specializations over the next 12,000 years. /s But seriously, it's never going to zero.
No need for specialized commercial software, if everyone can just explain to the computer what they want in English.